Into the Forest, Towards Oblivion: Edward Thomas and D. H. Lawrence

 Here I look at two 20^th century poems about death and dying.   Each deals with the subject  through images drawn from the natural world or from everyday experience. The poems are  are Edward Thomas's Lights Out and D. H. Lawrence's The Ship of Death. Both poems contemplate the end of life with unusual honesty, yet they arrive at very different visions of what awaits us. I explore the contrast.

The poems are here [ Valid June 15th 2026: Open in new tab]: The Ship of Death  and  Lights Out

Edward Thomas's Lights Out and D. H. Lawrence's The Ship of Death are poems that confront mortality without sentimentality. Neither turns away from the fact of death. But these poems express two very different visions of what it means to approach the end of life.

In Lights Out, Thomas guides the traveller to the edge of an "unfathomable" forest. Roads and tracks lead towards it, but at the brink they lose their certainty:

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.

The roads of life appear to promise destinations and purposes. Yet at the forest's edge these distinctions dissolve. The traveller enters a realm beyond ordinary understanding.

Crucially, Thomas never tells us what lies within the wood. The mystery remains intact. The forest is 'unfathomable' because it resists explanation. Yet the poem is not troubled by this ignorance. On the contrary, its serenity arises from accepting it. The speaker declares, 'I desire to go.'There is no struggle against the darkness. The forest is entered willingly. The poem's power lies in its trust that not everything needs to be known. Death is imagined as a mystery into which one passes.

Lawrence's poem begins from a very different premise. Here death is not a mystery, but a destination repeatedly named. That destination is oblivion.

Build then the ship of death, for you must take
the longest journey, to oblivion.

The word appears more than once and stands at the centre of the poem's vision. Unlike Thomas's forest, oblivion is not unfathomable. Its meaning is stark. It suggests the extinction of consciousness, the erasure of identity, the end of striving and memory.  

Yet the drama of Lawrence's poem does not lie solely in its destination. It lies in the possibility that the destination is not always  finally reached. The poem's most striking moment comes with a sudden reversal:

Ah wait, wait, for there is the dawn,
the cruel dawn of coming back to life...

The adjective 'cruel' transforms the poem. The return to life is not welcomed. It is endured. The voyager approaches oblivion, only to be drawn once more into existence. Death itself is no longer the primary challenge. The challenge is recurrence. The voyage is undertaken, interrupted, and perhaps undertaken again.

This difference separates Lawrence fundamentally from Thomas. Thomas imagines a mystery entered into. For  Lawrence the destination has a finality, but it is the journey which carries the uncertainty.

Even the famous image of the 'little ship, with oars and food and little dishes' acquires a different significance in this light. At first these details seem reassuringly domestic. They bring the language of the comfort of ordinary life into a poem about death. Yet they do not soften the destination. Rather, they express sympathy for the traveller. The little provisions are not evidence that the journey is easy. They are evidence that it is difficult. The tenderness lies not in confidence about what awaits but in care for the one who must undertake the voyage.

Meantime, Lawrence's allusions to Shakespeare's Hamlet are particularly revealing. Hamlet imagines death as ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.’ Lawrence presents a more unsettling possibility. His poem expresses the  anxiety is that the traveller may return before the voyage has finally achieved its destination. The repeated references to oblivion suggest that extinction remains the goal towards which the journey moves, yet the 'cruel dawn of coming back to life' introduces that possibility of interruption and recurrence.

The Hamlet echoes deepen the poem's darkness. Shakespeare's prince contemplates the possibility of ending life with a ‘bare bodkin’  yet hesitates at the uncertainty of what may follow death. Lawrence inherits something of that sombre atmosphere. The question is no longer whether death should be chosen; death is inevitable. The question is how one prepares for its arrival.

The result is a poem that possesses a stoic rather than a consoling wisdom. Lawrence does not ask us to trust a mystery. He does not promise that oblivion is benign. Instead he insists that the voyage awaits us and that preparation is necessary. This is where the contrast with Thomas is sharpest. Thomas finds peace in mystery. Lawrence finds dignity in necessity. The traveller in Lights Out walks willingly into the wood. The voyager in The Ship of Death builds his vessel because he must.

 

The Quest of Simon Richardson

As part of my recent focus on the life of H.W 'Bill' Tilman, I have read the story of his final voyage as a member of the crew in a 1977 expedition. The voyage was headed by the 23-year-old Simon Richardson, who had previously sailed on one of Tilman's own voyages.

Simon Richardson was a young, adventurous sailor but whose expedition aboard his boat En Avant ended in complete mystery. After leaving Lymington and reaching Rio without incident,  En Avant  left Rio for Port Stanley with a crew of six, including Tilman, and was never seen again. 

In this book, Simon’s mother, Dorothy Richardson, offers a calm, clear-eyed portrait of her son’s short life, weaving in his 1973 diary from his earlier voyage with Tilman (the diary gives a rare and sympathetic portrait of the the man. ) and letters he wrote from Rio that show no hint of trouble. 

The appendixes gather expert speculation about what might have happened to En Avant, but no firm conclusion is possible. The result is a restrained, sympathetic account that appeals to sailors, adventurers, and admirers of Tilman’s world.

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Footnote:

There is more to say about the story of En Avant. Next year sees the 50th anniversary of her departure from Lymington. 

Meantime here are some details (results of web search  today)  of  an HTV / ITV documentary titled "No Pay, No Prospects and Not Much Pleasure".   Broadcast in the early 1980s, this  documentary was produced and directed by John Mead to honour the extraordinary life of Tilman.  

Programme Details & Background

• The Title: The name of the documentary is taken directly from Tilman's famously blunt, recurring classified advertisement used to recruit crews for his perilous voyages: "No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure."
• The Interview Context: The documentary covers Tilman’s final, fateful expedition in 1977. At 79 years old, Tilman signed up as an ordinary crew member under the 24-year-old skipper Simon Richardson. They set sail for Antarctica's Smith Island on En Avant—a converted, old steel tugboat that Simon had painstakingly stripped down and rebuilt himself. 
• The Disappearance: The ship and its six young crew members, along with Bill Tilman, vanished without a trace in the South Atlantic in late 1977. 
• Dorothy Richardson's Role: In the film, Simon’s mother, Dorothy Richardson, provides a  moving interview about her son's fierce spirit of independent adventure, his bond with Tilman, and the legacy of the En Avant crew. She later compiled her son's diaries and letters into the      biography under discussion here: The Quest of Simon Richardson. 

Current Availability

The documentary was originally produced by the regional ITV franchise HTV (Harlesden Television / HTV Wales). Because it is a historic regional broadcast, it is not widely available on mainstream commercial streaming platforms. However, physical DVD prints exist, and it is occasionally preserved or shared within classic sailing networks, outdoor film societies, or regional British television archives. 

I've yet to find it, or see it.....

When Inclusion Becomes Erosion — Revised

 

Inclusion without capacity isn’t compassion — it’s abandonment. When the state hollows out, communities are left to carry tensions they never chose. Here, I have written about how Britain’s outsourced systems are turning welcome into erosion.

I take my cue from Anoosh Chakelian’s 'How Britain Lost Control' New Statesman cover story this week. The article offers a vivid, unsettling portrait of a country where the state has hollowed itself out, outsourcing its responsibilities to private contractors and leaving communities to absorb the consequences. Her reporting from Wigan — of overcrowded HMOs, fraying neighbourhoods, and a government that has lost the capacity to enact its own ideals — illuminates the very dynamics I was trying to name.

This revision is an attempt to place my earlier reflections within that wider, more concrete frame. The erosion I wrote about  in the abstract is visible in the streets, houses, and lives Chakelian describes. To speak of inclusion today is to reckon with the structures that make it possible — or impossible. And so I have rewritten this piece to acknowledge the lived realities that now press upon it. Realities  about which many  folk living comfortable privileged lives for example, continue to parrot abstract banalities.

There are moments when a society’s virtues begin to fray not because they were wrong, but because the institutions meant to hold them have grown too weak to bear their weight. We speak easily of inclusion, hospitality, openness. These are good words, necessary words. But they depend on a moral architecture  and when that architecture weakens, even our best intentions can become sources of strain.

In recent years I have found myself returning to this question: What happens when a society tries to welcome more people than it can meaningfully care for? Not because the newcomers are unwelcome, nor because the locals are unkind, but because the state that once mediated between them has abandoned the business of leadership and lost the ability to understand a nation which daily witnesses a tolerance of injustice and unfairness and which shows a lack of empathy for justified concerns.

Anoosh Chakelian’s recent reporting from Wigan offers hard detail. She describes Darlington Street — a long terrace of redbrick houses, once home to mill workers and miners — now transformed into a symbol of Britain’s political and moral drift. “Every other house has been taken up as an HMO,” one MP tells her, as private contractors pack asylum seekers, ex‑offenders, and the homeless into the cheapest streets they can find. The result is not hostility so much as exhaustion: neighbours who no longer know who lives next door, communities that feel transient, and a quiet sense that something once solid has begun to dissolve.

This is not the fault of those who arrive, nor of those already there. It is the consequence of a state that has outsourced its responsibilities to companies whose duty is not to the common good but to the contract and it's financial drivers. Serco, Mears, Clearsprings — names that hover at the edges of public consciousness — now run vast tracts of what used to be the work of government. They house asylum seekers, manage detention centres, operate speed cameras, run NHS catering, and even maintain the radar stations that watch the skies. They are, as Chakelian puts it, the “shadow state”: indispensable, unaccountable, and largely unseen.

In such a landscape, inclusion becomes a slogan rather than a practice. The state disperses vulnerable people into the cheapest corners of the country, leaving local councils to absorb the consequences without the means to respond. Residents feel policies are being done to them, not with them. Asylum seekers live in houses where toilets go unfixed for a year, where four mattresses are pushed into a single room, where the weekly support payment sometimes fails to arrive and where easy money is to be made by property speculating go-betweens who can buy up properties and sell them on as risk-free investments as a Serco- managed packages. And all the while, the political class speaks of compassion and control as though either were still within its grasp.

This is the erosion which should concern us all: not the erosion of values, but the erosion of the structures that make values possible. A society cannot meaningfully include newcomers if it cannot house its own citizens. It cannot preach neighbourliness while leaving neighbours to negotiate overcrowded streets, rising rents, and the slow unravelling of local trust. It cannot ask communities to carry burdens that the state itself has deliberately laid aside.

The tragedy is that everyone suffers. The asylum seeker who fled war only to find him/herself in a broken house and hostile, suspicious neighbours. The lifelong resident who watches her street change overnight and feels she has no voice in the matter. The council officer who knows what needs to be done but lacks the budget to do it. The politician who promises reform but inherits a system too entangled to unwind.

Inclusion, in such a context, becomes a fragile thing. It requires more than sentiment. It requires capacity — the ability to build homes, to plan coherently for education and employment, to mediate between competing needs, to hold communities together rather than leaving them to fray. 

Without that capacity, inclusion becomes erosion: not because we welcomed too many - though as an island nation losing  vast tracts of productive land for food security or for breathing space away from crowded cityscapes this also can be debated - but because we built too little, planned too little, cared too little at the level where care must be organised.

We need a  recognition that compassion without competence is a brittle virtue.

In the end, the question is not whether we should be an open or a closed country, generous or guarded, welcoming or wary. The deeper question is whether we still possess the civic and moral power to hold the tensions that any real society must carry: the tension between neighbourliness and change, between compassion and capacity, between the needs of those who arrive and the needs of those already here. 

A state that has hollowed itself out cannot hold these tensions; it leaves communities to absorb them alone, and then wonders why resentment grows. If we are to rebuild anything worth calling a common life, we will need a politics that can bear disagreement without panic, and a public realm strong enough to mediate between competing goods.

Our country needs to be governed — not managed, not outsourced, not placated — by a government that understands inclusivity and understands that dissent needs to be part of that inclusivity, not judged by any arbitrary virtue‑signalling standard.